The pharmaceutical, the fine chemicals and the food industry need a number of compounds that have to be isolated from complex mixtures such as extracts of animal or plant tissue, or fermentation broth. Often these isolation processes determine the price of the product.
Conventional isolation processes are not very specific and during the isolation processes the compound to be isolated is diluted considerably with the consequence that expensive steps for removing water or other solvents have to be applied.
For the isolation of some specific compounds affinity techniques are used. The advantage of these techniques is that the compounds bind very specifically to a certain ligand. However these ligands are quite often very expensive.
To avoid spillage of these expensive ligands they can be linked to an insoluble Support. However, often linking the ligand is also expensive and, moreover, the functionality of the ligand is often affected negatively by such procedure.
So a need exists for developing cheap processes for preparing highly effective immobilized ligands.